Sleepwalking
by Haberdashing
Summary: One-shot in which Dipper develops a problem with sleepwalking.


Dipper opened his eyes and found that his head was resting on the journal. He sat up, shook his head, and looked back down at the page he'd been reading the night before, finding that a few of the words had been blurred overnight by his drool. The boy yelped and tried to clean the pages with the palm of his hand, covering his skin in ink while only further obscuring the words.

"Dipper, I told you not to fall asleep reading that thing! You know you need some sleep- remember the last time you stayed up all night?" The boy turned his head and saw that his sister was already up and dressed, giving Waddles scratches under the ear as she spoke. How late had he slept?

Dipper rubbed his eyes and sighed, recalling the horrible consequences of his previous bout of sleep deprivation. "Yeah, you're right. But I want to learn as much as I can before the summer's over, you know?"

Mabel walked over to her brother and ruffled his hair. "Take a break, bro-bro. Let's go eat breakfast and watch some TV, alright?"

"Alright." Dipper nodded and went to shut the journal. As he took one last glance before shutting the book, he noticed that he had apparently fallen asleep on one of the pages he'd written about his own experiences in Gravity Falls. But hadn't he been reading about… about… was it the gnomes, or an intelligence-boosting mushroom, or…?

The boy shook his head and followed his smiling sister and her pig out of the room. Mabel was right. He needed to get some rest.

After a long day of watching cartoons and, after some coercion from his sister, another viewing of _Dream Boy High_, Dipper fell asleep on the couch in their TV room, the television still playing some horror movie he'd watched a dozen times before. He leaned against Mabel, and she against him, the warmth and softness of his sister's sweater helping to lull the boy to sleep.

Dipper woke up lying on the floor, his head pounding, Mabel nowhere to be seen. He scrambled to get up, missing his sister's warmth, barely noticing the aching of his back. He'd tossed and turned quite a bit in his sleep before- Mabel teased him about it from time to time, though it never stopped them from sharing a bed when the twins needed the comfort of each other's presence. Falling off the bed- well, couch- entirely was a new one, though. He must be flailing even more than normal. Stress getting to him, probably.

The next night, though, the pattern became unmistakable. He'd definitely fallen asleep in his bed in the attic that night, not leaning against the bedroom door, and his knees hadn't been scraped before, either. Dipper knew that he needed to talk to somebody, and he knew just who to choose as his confidant.

"Mabel?" They were side by side in the Mystery Shack's gift shop now, putting up merchandise and attaching exorbitant price tags at Grunkle Stan's request, as a recent tourist-packed bus and an especially convincing tour of the shack had left the shack's gift shop half-empty. "Have I ever sleepwalked before?"

Mabel met his glance and shook his head. "Nope. You've talked in your sleep a couple times before." She giggled before imitating his brother's mumbling. "_Oh, Wendy… I love you too, Wendy…_"

Dipper gently whacked his sister on the arm, his cheeks growing hot. "Shut up! She's right over-"

"-At the counter, reading a magazine, ignoring everybody?"

Dipper looked over. Mabel was right- Wendy had her feet up on the counter and was immersed in the pages of some brightly-colored magazine, only occasionally looking up and mumbling a few words when a customer asked her a question. "Yeah, okay. But no sleepwalking before, huh?"

"Nope, no sleepwalking. Why?"

"I…" Dipper sighed. "We'll talk later."

As the days went by, his sleepwalking antics got more pronounced, more bizarre. He woke up one night in front of the shack's vending machine. Then he woke up in the kitchen, surrounded by empty bottles of Pitt soda, his face caked with the beverage's sticky remains. Every night he found new scrapes, new cuts, new bruises that he didn't know the cause of. But what was he supposed to do? He'd never bothered looking up anything about sleepwalking since it had never been a problem before, and the journal was no help when it came to such a mundane topic. All he could do was power through it and hope for the best.

A week and a half after the sleepwalking began, Dipper had been consulting the journal late at night again, despite Mabel's advice. He woke up to find himself on a different page than before, but at this point, that was nothing compared to where he'd found himself other nights. But, as he examined the journal to figure out how many pages he'd flipped through in his sleep, the boy found something that chilled him to the bone.

"MABEL!"

The girl bolted upright from her sleeping position, her eyes only half-open. "Wazzup? You okay?"

"The journal! I lost two pages of the journal!" Dipper started frantically shaking the journal, then digging around under his bed.

Mabel quickly joined him in the hunt, and the two tore apart the room, looking high and low for the missing pages. Finally, as Dipper threw his sheets onto the floor, out fell… not the pages themselves, but a few crinkled scraps of paper, their yellow-brown color making their origin unmistakable.

Dipper paced across the room, his hands clutching the hair atop his head. "Oh no oh no oh no what am I going to DO?"

Mabel patted him on the shoulder, and his hands loosened their grip and fell to his side. "Calm down. We'll figure something out, okay?"

Dipper took a deep breath, let it go, and looked back at his sister. "Promise?"

"Promise."

But though that promise from his sister helped to assuage his fears, it couldn't remove the pit in his stomach, or the sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong.

That evening, Dipper got a call from Wendy.

"Hey, Dipper, you still on for tomorrow night?"

The boy racked his brains, but couldn't remember what plans he'd made with her. Would he really forget something that important, especially when it had to do with Wendy? "Tomorrow night?" he repeated numbly.

"Yeah, we're watching _The Widdlest Wampire 2: All Grown Up_, remember? I'm super-psyched!"

"Uh… When did we plan this again?"

"…Last night. You know, that call at two in the morning? You really need to stop staying up like that, man."

"You sound like Mabel." Dipper grumbled. As he further processed Wendy's words, he added. "But… I wasn't up that late last night, really!" As he spoke, the boy began to connect the dots. He'd been sleepwalking and sleeptalking before, that much he knew… was this the first time he'd combined the two? And what else had he told Wendy when not awake to control himself?

"'Course you were, dummy. Oh, and stop calling me Toots, will ya? That's just weird."

Toots… Toots… But he'd never called her-

And then it clicked.

"Wendy, I have to go!"

"Dipper, what-"

He hung up the phone and raced upstairs, his heart pounding, his legs aching, only slowing down after coming face-to-face with his confused sister.

"What's the matter, bro-bro?"

Dipper dug out the journal and flipped through it rapidly, stopping where the two pages had been ripped out. Just as the boy had suspected, the lost pages were those talking about _him_.

"This is really important, alright?" Dipper stood up and extended the journal to Mabel. "Mabel, you need to hide this from me."

Mabel raised an eyebrow, her hands reaching out and supporting the book as he held it out. "Where?"

"Don't tell me where! Just… get rid of it, okay? Somewhere nobody will find it- where _I _won't find it."

"…what's going on?"

"I-"

Before the boy could finish the sentence, he felt himself leaving his body, until he looked down upon his own physical being, which now moved under the will of another, speaking in a voice that was his own and yet not his own. "Actually, sister, I changed my mind. I need to look up _one more thing_. Just let me be alone outside for some time." His body tugged the journal away from his sister's loose grasp.

"…okay. Just don't be late for dinner, alright?"

"Not a problem, Sh-sister." And then, as Dipper's possessed body turned away from Mabel and walked outside, there was that grin on his face again, that creepy, too-wide grin, and it started to sink in for Dipper that he was too late, maybe by just a minute, maybe ever since he made that stupid deal.

Dipper's ghost followed his body deep into the woods, far from any of the houses of Gravity Falls, a place that nobody else would stumble upon. A practiced arm built a small pile of sticks, then put the journal on top. It was Dipper's own body that got out a lighter that he didn't know had been placed in one of the pockets of his vest, his own body that brought the flame up to the book and set it ablaze. The fire that consumed the journal's priceless pages was not a supernatural blue, but a perfectly natural yellow-orange hue, and the sheer mundanity of it made the situation all the creepier.

Then his body turned towards Dipper's ghost, that creepy grin as wide as ever. "The first show might have ended, but it seemed to me like we needed an encore- don't you agree, Pine Tree?"

Dipper was for a loss of words. He didn't respond to the demon inhabiting his body, too focused on watching the pages he had spent so long studying and preserving turn to ash and dust, the book's priceless words becoming cinders lost in the wind.

"Well, my work here is done. You can have this back now." Dipper's body slumped to the ground as Bill left it and reverted to the triangular form that the boy had grown to loathe. "Just remember- I'll _see you later._" As he spoke his last words, Bill's eye flickered through a bunch of images that Dipper couldn't quite catch or comprehend. The dream demon disappeared, but his last words still seemed to echo throughout the woods.

There was nothing left for Dipper to do, no way of reversing Bill's actions, no way to put back together what the demon had destroyed. So Dipper just stared as the flames that had consumed his precious journal slowly died down, cursing his own folly as the light of the fire dimmed.


End file.
